Underground Railway and The Big Plan

The underground railway was a very interesting system in Amy’s eyes.

Having an elevator move trains across the different levels of the city sounded so unnecessary it was fun. It was fun to theorize if it was due to problems unloading the cargo outside of the main city or if it was because they feared for the locomotives.

Both answers had good arguments online, and both of them were about that one time someone decided to make a real AI. Another fun event in this place’s history, by the way, and one that almost broke the hundred-floors city.

How someone was stupid enough to create an unchained machine was somehow beyond the idol’s understanding, though. Not that she could really say much about it…

As they were moving, Lily tried to probe their hulking leader for information, but he dodged the subject each time for hard-to-guess reasons. Hard to guess to the non-machine-attuned girl, at least. Her pink partner was instead sure that this delay was only due to the innocuous cameras around the wagon.

Henrique's objectives were whatever they were, he wasn't interested in having anyone outside here know it. How it would work considering why Amy and Lily were here was a question, but that was for later.

Be as it was, Henrique’s expedition was currently sitting on the floor of the number four cargo freight. They crossed the automated storage, the upper secondary energy reactor, and then the farming and refining complexes. This, in summary, meant that they went through all the almost unmanned floors. The only one left was the one that acted both as a mining platform and a city for outcasts.

Differently from the upper floors and their messed-up but very clean style, or the planned making of the mid-floors, this one was chaos.

Conveyor belts transporting minerals up and waste down, containers waiting to be moved around, recycling plants, and waste disposal facilities, they all shared the space with shacks and other improvised buildings here.

And moving around these, there were groups and more groups of very slim people. Slim people that, even if not healthy-looking at all, didn’t seem to care too much. At least most of them seemed to not.

Some were wandering around with blanked-out eyes and scary grins on their faces. Some were bunched together on the floor around what seemed to be some kind of improvised hookah. Some were inside one or other small pub-looking building. And some were simply leaning on the floor without a worry in mind.

Very few would even stop to look at the moving train. And even fewer seemed to have something similar to animosity or even interest.

Other than their weird antics, though, the most noticeable thing about the dwellers of this undercity was its style.

The shacks were full of random neon signs and mismatched materials, which was also how Amy would describe the people's clothes. They lacked the antique-looking style and the mix of cultures of the upper floors at all. Things around here were more unique, for lack of a better word, and weirder too.

Leather, cloth, metal, plastic, and all in between bunched together to create a myriad of different and colorful clothes. Most of them weren’t beautiful to any stretch of the imagination, that’s for sure, but they were interesting.

They somehow remembered the people from some virtual worlds Amy had once visited though. Some of the post-apocalypse ones if she remembered well.

It made the colorful idol not look out of place when compared to the usual Miskarian citizen. Not that she really cared about looking the part in that steel city.

Looking the part wouldn’t give her the fame she wanted to begin with. Just like this underground hole wouldn't help her with it too.

In the end, all she could take from observing the outside was being sure that this place didn’t suit her needs. She wouldn’t get much from these people and they likely wouldn’t care about an idol. Their real source of entertainment and interest was inside a syringe or a pipe in the end.

And so, she soon lost interest in them and turned back to focusing on the train instead. She had more pressing matters here. Pressing matters in the form of two girls fawning over her partner and being barked off.

It was almost a personal crusade to keep these color-coded girls away from Lily and her proper mate finishing his recovery back in the city.

She was doing little more than moving around forcing the twins to not attach themselves to Lily, but it was still some fighting back. It was also something that made the whole situation go even more hyper, but that was a problem only for Lily. The other three were having fun with it. In fact, even the professor seemed to find this situation amusing.

The beaten lawyer didn’t seem to care anyway, though, and was only watching in silence.

It seemed to be a status quo that would continue until they had arrived at their destination, but many alarm-like sounds broke this idea.

“Hold on something, everyone. I reckon we’ll speed up a little now to with some obstruction...” Henrique called out as he remembered the procedures, but his worry ended up being unfounded. For one, the train didn't start to speed up as it should. “That’s weird. I’m sure the proper procedure is to break through any small abnormality or full-stop if it’s something too big…”

As he was saying, the underground railway had a very strict working procedure. Whenever something got close or in the way of the rails, sensors would calculate if it was or wasn’t possible to bulldoze the way through. If it was, then the vehicle would set its rail guard, start the sirens and speed up, and if it wasn’t, then it would instead stop and set defensive measures.

Other than these, the only other situation in which the speed changed was when stopping to load or unload cargo. It was never meant to stop otherwise and was never meant to slow down without stopping since it lacked weaponry while moving.

But still, that was exactly what was happening.

“I’m quite sure we’re slowing down, teach…”

“Have you slackened on your preparations, teach?”

“Of course not. I made sure to find every single bit of information I could on everything we would see here. It would be terrible if we messed up on something obscure and had a certain corporate slave cut us off…”

“Hmm, Mr. Vellaron… I think you’re misunderstanding my role in…” The suit-wearing man tried to explain something, but was cut midsentence.

“You’re here to keep us under leash, and I don’t need your excuses to know this much. But I’m hoping to make you understand that you and your mighty bosses won’t have another piece of history destroyed for profit.”

“That’s not…”

Henrique’s eyes angrily went to the poor-looking officer worker on the corner of the wagon for a moment there, but he went back to his students very fast. By his expression and the troubled expression on the women’s faces, it seemed that it was more of a personal problem than anything, though.

All Amy knew about the quiet guy was that he worked for a big-name law firm, just like a certain dead body from a while ago. Although, this one was more of a goon than a lawyer. Newbies on this field weren’t the most well-treated around.

Not that Amy cared about lawyers anyway. She would never need them and this one wasn't one of her fans... yet.

To her, what mattered more was that the sirens had stopped and she could see, even if only for a moment, the train passing by a group of drunk men. From their trajectory, they had barely left the railway a few moments ago. She then blinked her emerald green eyes and allowed their transport to accelerate again.

These tracks were red enough as they were for the short idol.

“Now that I remember it…” She stopped looking at the windows and turned to the silent person on the wagon. “I am yet to hear your name, lawyer guy.”

She didn’t care about lawyers, but Amy wouldn’t risk another mess up like on the tower. If this guy wasn’t in the briefing, then she would make a background check on him herself and deal with it if needed. She only needed his name first.

“Huh? Me?” He asked in surprise, receiving a tsunami of nods from the pink girl in answer. “I’m Benjamin Mardochee, D&F Law. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Amy Wright.”

“I do not like such stiffness, Ben. Call me ‘Amy’ or ‘The Best Idol Ever’ or ‘Goddess’, but not something boring like ‘Ms. Amy’, understood?” The overbearing girl demanded in a serious tone that lost whatever effect it had when her next phrase came. “And if I may ask… What is your role in this expedition?”

“He is here to try and undo all our work, missy!” Their nominal leader shouted out again, glaring at the barely important lawyer as he did. “His only job is to prove that our expeditions are useless and dangerous, so they should instead be dismantled. And of course, as they are destroyed, whatever piece of history would be either thrown away or sold to who could pay more.”

“As I said, Mr. Vellaron, that is wrong… I’m here to see that your group is following the agreed conditions. This ‘archeological site’, as you call it, is still a government-owned plot of land with leases to several mining companies, so…”

“Your conditions and this lease were BOTH created after we managed to get permission for my expedition. And both of them exist only to destroy another piece of the limited history we can still find before the first spire was built!”

“Even if you say so, Mr. Vellaron…”

“Aham!” The annoyed purple-colored idol on the fringes of the discussion cleared her throat to stop the useless back-and-forth. “Let me check a thing, ok? Someone found another ruin somewhere…”

“It was in the middle of an area known for being way too dangerous to be mined, Lily.”

“Thanks, Amy. So, someone found this thing in a no-mine zone, this professor managed to get access and permission to study it. But still, the whole thing was sold to someone and a bunch of conditions for his expedition ended put in place. Is this right?”

“Ooooh! It’s exactly that.”

“Good summary.”

Both sisters nodded along Lilianna’s work on making sense of the whole discussion and then started to lightly clap at her. With Amy joining too at some point.

And weird as it was, their acting made the heating-up professor calm down and fix his glasses before saying anything more. On the other side, the skinny lawyer just turned his head to Lily and went silent again, letting the professor continue.

“It’s as you say. At first, my plan was to fight back legally, but I received information that a certain company already had plans to explore the area in secret. It was such a lucky shot that these plans were stolen and made public...” Henrique explained in the most controlled way he could, but it was possible to see that he was both upset and hiding something. “In the end, the best I could do was try a new approach and move around their forced rules while doing so.”

“And this ‘new approach’ was why you called us, right?”

“Exactly. Since going headfirst wasn’t possible, we decided to…”

“Raise the public awareness to get them on our side!” Kuro shouted excitedly, cutting through her professor as if it was nothing.

“Use the power of the masses to topple the establishment.” Shiro added without a tenth of the energy of her sister, but with a certain determination in her eyes.

“And right when we were trying to find a way to do it, do you know what happened?”

“We saw an interview on how you both managed to keep your popularity high for so long.”

“Hey, I asked them, Kuro!”

“You lose too much time.”

“And you’re boring.”

“And I am AWESOME!”

“We know that already.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Do not mess with Lily and we shall be good friends, you know?”

“By all hells, they’re multiplying…” Lily held her temples as she watched the devolution of the explanation with Amy joining in. “Focus here, you three! You didn’t explain to me what’s this damn plan to begin with…”

The black-and-white twins and the pink mass of frills exchanged a small stare, and then answered Lily all at the same time in a variety of voice tones.

“We are streaming the expedition.”